- When Does Quantity Become Quality? How to navigate big data | UX Magazine
Quote: Data should not be used for finding evidence to support our own opinions and assumptions. Data gives us an opportunity for to reach out to more users and understand them better. This comes with greater responsibility for UX professionals, who need to exercise more rigorous testing and validation of the “insights” gleaned before rushing to implementing them.
- Innovate on Purpose: Indifferent innovation
Quote: As innovators, we need to understand what the customer’s ultimate goals are – what they are trying to achieve. To use the financial services example again, few customers really care about their checking account. Checking is just table stakes. It needs to work, and work flawlessly. If you can create some minor improvements, great. But think about how financial services fits into the totality of what a customer is trying to do, and what financial services firms could offer to help the client meet those goals, then identify the various new products, services, experiences and features that flow from that insight.
- Data-Driven Design In The Real World | Smashing UX Design
Quote: As more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction.
- The Cost of Availability and Transparency | Lance Haun
Quote: The reason I bring this up is because transparent pricing and availability is one of the last big disrupters in the enterprise software space. While businesses don’t necessarily shop like consumers (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), the way that people are evaluating enterprise software is beginning to shift. I’ve heard of well-networked HR pros pulling RFP’s from other HR pros for the vendors they are shopping.
- Big data and the “Big Lie”: the challenges facing big brand marketers – O’Reilly Radar
Quote: There will always be a need for creativity in marketing; the best targeting algorithm and most accurate data set in the world can’t make a boring campaign compelling. So, the challenge for companies of all sizes is how best to integrate the Don Drapers and the data scientists. If you’ve worked on either side of the industry (traditional marketing or growth hacking), I’d love to hear your thoughts on what approaches have worked for you.
- Good Product Management Matters! – UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley
Quote: As we noted in the study, “Mapping out exactly what the product manager is responsible for, when they are responsible for delivering it, and who they need to interact with across the product lifecycle is required for any product initiative to operate at a level of high performance. The regression analysis clearly shows that the more well-defined the product manager’s role is within the organization and the product team, the more likely the team is to be high performing.”
- The Dangerous Tension Between CMOs and CIOs – Glen Hartman – Harvard Business Review
Quote: You may never turn your CIO and CMO into the best of friends, but you should be able to convince them they are natural allies. If a little competitive rivalry gets them both to bring their best games to work, so be it. But everyone needs to realize they are part of a team, their job is to make it stronger, and the real competition is out there in the marketplace.
- Math matters: how big data is building the future of everything | The Verge
Quote: And with heaps of data being shared in online databases, those successes are likely to keep coming. Ceder hopes to see the Materials Genome Initiative will lead to big innovations in materials science in the same, unpredictable way the web transformed many facets of modern life. “When you make stuff like this available,” he says, “you cannot anticipate what people will do with it.”
Links for Sept 29 2013
